New York interaction designer Cooper Smith has created an intriguing set of visualizations of Nike+ data. I’m not quite sure how, but Smith obtained about 1,000 runs’ worth of data for New York City. He then created several maps to reveal some interesting information.

Most runs take place in Central Park, along the coastline and across the bridges. A lot of running activity occurs in NYC; people rarely run during overnight hours. Runs originating in Central Park tend to be longer than those whose destination is Central Park. People in Central Park tend to run fast. Running through midtown causes runners a lot of temporary delays. Runners have to come to a complete stop quite often.

As Jeroen Beekmans at Pop Up City points out, this is valuable information for parks and recreation planners. Smith was interested in understanding how a runner perceives the urban realm, and planners can use this information to locate areas that are most lacking to target programs or investments. Not only that, Nike could use this information to build a product suggesting the most populated, fastest, or most uninterrupted for an individual runner.